1. This abode, on the hilltops,
Sorrow has made its garden smile through weeping,

2. And spring has clothed it in a dress of light
Woven by the fingers of the breeze.

3. Ask the caravans to incline toward it
With the graceful camels' through-and-through.

4. It is an abode where my youth found
Its garment hem in the water of life,

5. And it seems I see, among its ruins,
A fawn with two braceleted wrists.

6. Gazelles that sand grooms, maidens
That mountain roes love as their kin.

7. Like moons upon withering boughs
In hollows that hardly hold them.

8. If they smile, the passes smile
With the melody of a dormant cloud.

9. They quench their thirst when dawn reveals
Their grazing, white as the arfaj shrub.

10. And, prominent through al-‘Amariyya, a house
Adorned as the winds adorn it.

11. A maiden who fills the eyes with beauty -
She is my malady, she is my remedy.

12. I enjoyed them in a verdant life
That rains as a singing garden (rains).

13. So my foolishness has had its fling
And left in my temple a swarthy-white lock,

14. And to me the darkness of youth
Is fairer than the shining gray hair.

15. As for the memory of that time, my solace
Is a hot sigh on a flaming breath.

16. Whenever it kindles a fire in the heart,
My eyelid, O mother of calamities, drips with water.